Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Texas Rangers (Columbia, 1951)

Rip-roaring

Popular culture loved the Texas Rangers.
Not the real ones, of course, just a highly fictionalized, not to say idealized
invented version. As early as 1915 Zane Grey published The Lone Star Ranger, dedicated to Ranger Captain John Hughes, about
badman Buck Duane who redeems himself with the Rangers. In 1936 Fred MacMurray was
badman-turned-Ranger, in Paramount’s The Texas Rangers, a patriotic picture written by director King Vidor and his
wife with Louis Stevens, based on a short story by Walter Prescott Webb but
with very Zane Grey antecedents.

Real Rangers

The early-50s radio Tales of the Texas Rangers starring Joel McCrea was set in the 1930s
and there were more ‘Western’ TV series that featured the Rangers, such as the
mid-50s CBS juvenile Tales of the
Texas Rangers with Willard Parker and the same studio’s slightly more adult
late-50s Trackdown with Robert Culp.
In the 60s we had NBC’s light-hearted Laredo
with Philip Carey. As late as the 1990s we had Chuck Norris as Walker, Texas Ranger. And a new TV series,
Texas Rangers, is said to be in
development.

Back on the big screen, Paramount made a
sequel to the King Vidor picture in 1940, Texas
Rangers Ride Again, and in 1949 the Vidor one was remade in color with
William Holden as Streets of Laredo. There
was the inevitable spaghetti Texas Ranger
in 1964. There was a TV movie The Texas
Rangers in 1981 and a straight-to-video Texas
Rangers in 2001. It seems that the Texas Rangers are an inexhaustible
source of inspiration for movie makers.

Not the least of them was Columbia’s
1951 offering, a B-Western really but a lot of fun, The Texas Rangers with George Montgomery as, you’ve guessed it, a
badman become Ranger.

It was an Edward and Bernard Small production (though
sadly no megalomaniac giant Small logo) and they got old hand Phil Karlson (left) to
direct. Karlson had started as a prop boy at Universal and done pretty well
every job Hollywood could offer. IMDb tells us that “He made his mark in the
1950s with a series of tough, realistic, violent crime films noted for their
gritty location shooting and Karlson's almost fanatic attention to detail”. He
only helmed seven Westerns, not a great total. The ‘biggest’ was probably Gunman’s Walk in 1958 with Van Heflin - actually quite a thoughtful picture. But
he does a more-than-competent job on this shoot-‘em-up Texas Rangers tale.

George Montgomery (right) was never the most charismatic
of actors. His delivery always reminds me of Clayton Moore’s, so I don’t think
he was holding his breath much when the Oscars were about to be announced. He'd been tried out as Sam Spade but the plaudits were less than ecstatic, so it was back to the saddle. Still,
he did a solid job as Western lead, as various Montgomery oaters we have reviewed on this blog will attest, and this time too he puts his back into the
role as Rebel-turned-outlaw who, while serving time in the pen, having been
double-crossed by the evil Sundance Kid (Ian MacDonald), is recruited by Ranger
Captain John B Jones (John Litel) to serve in the Rangers and track down
Sundance and all the rest of the gang of famous outlaws.

Yes, it’s one of those Westerns in which every
known baddy is crammed in to the plot, along with a few invented ones. The leader of the bandits is smiling but ruthless Sam Bass (William Bishop) and his Number 2 is John Wesley Hardin (John Dehner), a “gentleman, lawyer and
killer”, who is a bank-robber and crook. Thuggish Dave Rudabaugh is there
(Douglas Kennedy); in fact he is one of the baddest of the bad men, and is
billed as ‘king of the cattle rustlers’. As the snarling Sundance is a gang member, we obviously have
to have Butch Cassidy with him (John Doucette). And Jock Mahoney (billed as
Jock O’Mahoney) is “Duke Fisher”.

The excellent John Dehner is a rather dudish (but murderous) John Wesley Hardin

All this is set in 1876, which is a bit odd
for a Butch/Sundance tale (Butch was ten years old then and Sundance nine) but
never mind.

The intensely silly but amusing plot was written
by good old Frank Gruber, who bashed out over 200 Westerns from The Kansan in 1943 to White Comanche in 1968.

Frank Gruber

Montgomery is Johnny Carver, “the fastest gun
in Texas”. The young Ranger calling himself Danny Bonner (Jerome Courtland, later to be director of Dynasty but as an actor he would appear with Montgomery in another oater the following year, Cripple Creek) turns out to be Johnny's
young brother, and he urges our hero to abandon outlawin’ and ride the
straight-and-narrow trail. Johnny’s sidekick is Buff Smith (Noah Beery Jr on a rather
fancy palomino), “a good boy in bad company” who gets religion, likes Ranger
life and sides with young Danny in his attempts to reform Carver Sr. But Johnny is determined, Ranger oath or not,
to get his revenge on that skunk Sundance.

The pards, Johnny, his brother Danny and Buff

John B Jones, by the way, 1834 – 1881, was a
real Ranger captain, as you probably know, commander of the Frontier Battalion, as it was called,
fighting Comanche, Kiowa and Apache. His force did indeed capture Sam Bass, in
1878. In the movie the Rangers are very advanced for 1876: they already have a
telephone.

John B Jones/John Litel

In this story Sam Bass’s gang kills thirty Rangers
a month though they never seem to run out and the (unnamed) governor (Charles Trowbridge) tells Jones that if he
doesn’t bring Bass and his gang in by the end of the month it will be the end
of the Texas Rangers. No pressure then.

Smiling Sam Bass

The real Sam Bass

There has to be a girl, of course. It’s Miss
Helen Fenton, publisher of The Waco Star,
who is very annoyed at Johnny Carver because her dad was killed in the
shoot-out when Johnny was captured (it was Sundance’s slug that did it). Waspish
and indeed pompous as she is toward Johnny, you sense that it will be nuptials
in the last reel and if you do think that, you won’t be far wrong. Miss Fenton is
played by Gale Storm, a Texas beauty who made it big on TV but she had done a
few Roy Rogers oaters and had also been Rod Cameron’s love interest in Panhandle and Audie Murphy’s in The Kid from Texas.

George with Gale

You can spot the likes of Trevor Bardette,
Paul E Burns, Byron Healey, Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan, and several others in the bit
parts.

Well, one by one the outlaws (and some of the
good guys) are killed off (including Sam Bass, Rudabaugh, Butch and Sundance) or
captured (Wes Hardin). It all climaxes with a humdinger of a train robbery (I
liked the expressmen playing cards on top of the chest holding a million
dollars, one raising the bidding seven cents). The whole thing is utterly
preposterous and verging on the lurid but a huge amount of fun.

2 comments:

Just my humble opinion but I think "THE TEXAS RANGERS" is George Montgomery's finest hour (well hour and then some). He made a lot of westerns, was good as a western lead, had a fantastic line in stetsons and I like many of his films. But, really, this was his very best, with "CRIPPLE CREEK" a decent runner-up.